skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
No. A product line of 3-5 products with minor variations each (with/without retina, 3 capacity sizes, two colors) is hardly "fragmented".

Contrast, say, Sony's offerings.
> Mass assignment is a fairly normal thing to do

No, it's an abnormal thing to do and a security hole.

> any parameters you want the model to ignore can be marked as so

Which is complete insanity.

> Rails loves DRY.

Yes so does PHP, hence register_globals.

That's on the "idiotic" side of "I don't want to write stuff", and even the Rails staff stopped defending this insanity back in March.
Apple does not have a monopoly in the mobile OS space.
I can't imagine writing in that, just... so much whitespace.
This is a link to the second page of the article. The single page version is here:

http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/201...
That's what I thought. Prototype is something which gives us the idea about usability by showing to relevant folk.
I'm amazed at how the discussion here has devolved into the merits of mass assignment. While that is a worthwhile topic in itself, specially given the recent github issues, any suggestion that the this issue would have been mitigated by the OP not using mass assignment is flawed.

Any webapp that I would consider secure MUST validate all input from clients. This includes white listing any and all parameters names, preferably in middleware, but at least in the controller. Allowing random keys in your input seems recipe for disaster, when you consider a multi layer app security policy. While this may seem like an overkill to some, this is best practice I've seen implemented in any project that deals with real money.

Hence, such a change in iOS WILL break any such application. Irrespective of your views on the sanity of mass assignment.

I would like to see a discussion on why apple thought it would be a good idea to introduce a new parameter to every request. Any ideas?
Facebook is not a business platform
If you pay attention to the self-congratulatory subtext of such complaints, it becomes clear that it's not really anything to do with being apocalyptic. No one is concerned that they personally are descending into a vapid, consumption-oriented existence -- it's always about how stupid and hopeless all those other people are.
It used to be, and was recently changed after they realized that even PHP had disabled `register_globals` years ago (also, after they realized even Github, one of the biggest Rails site out there, had left this hole wide open and a guy used it to demonstrate the issues on the rails repo/account, which was very funny drama: https://github.com/rails/rails/issues/5239 http://erratasec.blogspot.be/2012/03/rubygithub-hack-transla...)
http://global.sitesafety.trendmicro.com/
This meshes well with the article posted here yesterday written by one of the python core developers.

Nick Coghlan on the future of python[1]:

> We're a conservative community by nature - we generally don't like blazing trails when it comes to language design. Instead, we're happy to let others rush ahead, letting them figure out where the pitfalls are, while we see what we can learn from their experience and integrate into Python's syntax, standard libraries, or the Python Package Index.

I think this is one of the main reasons the scientific community seems to use python more than ruby. I work for a scientific computing company that uses python and and almost none of our clients are even considering the move to python3.

[1] http://www.boredomandlaziness.org/2012/10/pythons-future-glo...
Yup, still hesitant to click .xxx links at work even if it's not filtered. Didn't see any repercussions after the last time I accidentally clicked one at work (another HN article)... though I didn't get promoted this time around... correlation? I'm going to make myself feel better and say yes.
Higher fertility rates are more likely the cause
Yes, clearly having choice is confusing and anti-user. That is why the internet with multiple places to buy shoes, multiple place to get news, and multiple place to talk about technical topics is so unsuccessful.
Dear God, no! It would be like MyLife acquired Google (forget about the money) and poisoned Goog search with their crap! Hope there is not enough money is Zucks pocket to pull something like that!
Thanks to that blog post by Paul Graham about PR firms, I couldn't read this without thinking it's just a long, pathetic ad for shaving products.

My goal is to get to become so cynical that I only believe what I read in Dr. Seuss books.
Long live SHA3
Typescript to the rescue (in my nodejs code)
>if your ex-company says you weren't a leader and you say you were, they're often taken to be right and you're wrong

This is true, the best solution is normally to go elsewhere and succeed. Whether that means at another company or on your own. People tend to have a lens through which they understand the world, once they have slotted you it is over (see: bozo bit, various cognitive biases, etc...)
"the local butcher who has put out his meat in an Olympic display"

That is all.
STC Rochester Summit Awards Program and Competition
“Malnets” Were the Cause of Most Cyber-Attacks in 2012
My favorite keyboard is, hands down, the Microsoft Natural.

However, I'm often tempted to try a 122 key IBM:

http://pckeyboard.com/page/PC122/UB40B5A

Is anyone here using a 122-key?

Another one that tempts me is the Sun Type 7 (the 6 is USB too, but is too 90's):

http://www.oracle.com/us/products/servers-storage/desktop-wo...
The actual title of this article is "Another Way Apple's Fight With Google Is Hurting Users", which casts less blame than the modified title here on HN, "Another Way Apple's Fight Against Google Is Hurting Users".

It is unfair to present this ongoing situation as a war on Google by Apple. It is a competition between the two companies. Not to beat a long dead horse, but the war between the two companies started when Google entered the mobile device space.
I agree with you, but I also think that being a cynic/skeptic allows you to appear more intelligent, and that is why people (perhaps unconsciously) find flaws in an idea.

By finding flaws, you're almost saying you've outwitted the idea proposer.
Successful disruption includes being thorough in the disruption's long-term consequences. Seems Jobs didn't believe the 7" market would work, but competition shows there is demand so time to patch the hole and unify offerings from 3.5" to 27".
Infographic: How Smartphones and Social Analytics are Transforming Retail
>100 years ago, women still couldn't vote in the US and the country was legally segregated instead of just segregated in practice. 100 years ago, child labor was at its peak in the US, food safety was non-existstant, charlatans ran rampant in the practice of medicine, and cities were thick with the pollution of the industrial revolution.

Well, today women can vote but it doesn't matter who you vote anymore, the country is segregated in practice which is as worse as being legally segregated (and hypocritical to top), the labour movement is gone and burried, children are burdened by overprotective parents, money-grabbers ran rampant in the practice of medicine (including Big Pharma), the environment is severely damaged with the pollution of the industrial revolution, we have the capacity to kill everyone several times over with nukes (and bio weapons), neo-colonialism runs rampant, drones and similar technology pretty much ensure a future dictatorship of the most technologically advanced, mass surveillance was never as widespread as now, torture became en vogue again and somehow killing and or adducting citizens of sovereign states is now an acceptable practice even for western democracies, huge corporations control the worldwide food chain (Monsanto) and even invest in the water supply, while others patent DNA.

(I didn't even got into the economic depression that will be long-term, the wars for water of the future, or the possibility of peak oil).

>We live in a better world today than has ever existed for the greatest number of people

No. We just have better technology. Nothing special about our ethics or practices.
Plurality - A Sci-Fi Short That Deserves To Get Funded
Yeah, the discussion here seems to be missing the forest for the trees.

For non-Rails programmers an idea such as mass assignment sounds very strange, but if you ignore that, it still sounds odd at first request than an OS would inject parameters into a HTTP post request.
IBM Continues Networking Re-Entry with IBM SDN Controller
Towers of power should be discouraged all around, let alone in hello world examples.
> Like it is correct to have only one keyboard.

I beg to disagree. Android allows you to easily install additional keyboards, for people who want to switch to, say, Swype, or to use a different input method for their non-Latin alphabet.
Have Facebook Employees Learned From Yelp's Example?
The Role of L4-7 Network Intelligence for SDN
Fair enough, i'd love to only have one keyboard. But if my choice is between a keyboard with 26 letters + num pad, and a keyboard with simply a num pad. I'm more interested in the former. The point is, Apple has a market dominance right now, and is using that advantage to block innovative products from competing with them.

Besides, if the better search is an app, but you desire unification more there is no reason to download the app.
Likewise. I went to tw Olympic events, and watched the athletes. Both were excellent. I don't think I gave branding or copyrights a second thought.
Square Launches Merchant Directory Online
These folks are claiming that this is an issue without creating a minimal program that reproduces the issue. If it were a real issue it would be trivial to make an app that POSTs to an API and inspect the traffic.

I have inspected several POST requests from iOS 6 apps and have not seen anything like this yet.
Hard to tell from the post, but it sounds like Rails gave an Exception because it couldn't find should_group_accessibility_children, but that suggests that it would act on something it could find.

If there was a parameter that gave a user admin access, then Rails might accept such a parameter and that might be used to take control of the app.

It's similar to what happened to Github.

https://github.com/rails/rails/issues/5228

I would think that the API would validate the POST parameters, ignore unexpected parameters and give errors for malformed expected ones. Taking it a bit further the developer should then be notified of malformed POST parameters being present and decide if it is a bug or an attack.
To be clear, both of the quotes you have there are pg's from "How Not to Die" -- excerpted in the article but not quotes from the OP.
> This isn't a Rails issue, it can affect any web framework.

Not exactly. Most web frameworks don't have a built-in "mass assignment", let alone enable it by default.
A New Tech Generation Defies the Odds in Japan
Facebook paid posts reveal the real value of our customer reach
Agreed. But I just call that "being too stubborn to learn from your experiences"
Luunr Beta Launched - Moving the Social Web Beyond Friends Lists
rayiner is in no way discounting the important role of activists. Accurately examining history is, I believe, a celebration of those brave men and women.
Until we see google blocking apple's apps from the android market, I don't think there's any moral equivalence here.
Sure, just like butterfly knives are safe because you can find some safety tips online.

Edit to reply to edits: Mass assignment is still dangerous "out of the box" since you have to switch on the whitelist behavior by calling attr_accessible on your model classes. In the security guide, the older, more dangerous, attr_protected is introduced first.

I think every rails dev should be familiar with the security guide, but more than that I wish that security was the default. While anybody is free to make an app as insecure as they wish, it should be the exception rather than the default.
As pointed out below 1) they don't have a monopoly.

2) It wasn't just the bundling of IE, but also the use of APIs to prefer and favor IE over third party browsers, and restrictive agreements with OEMs.

Also part of the finding of fact in the case was the nature of how web browsers were obtained in that time period, long, slow downloads. Giving the bundled option a serious advantage. But again before we even get into the anticompetitive-ness of Apple, which no doubt many of their practices are, without a monopoly, it's fair play.
"Validating input" can yield a number of results, and ignoring incorrect data (keys) altogether is not only a valid reaction, it's a perfectly safe one and it's how the vast majority of systems work. Indeed, a number of usual patterns would break if that didn't work.

Mass-assignment and similar patterns (of shoving all request parameters into your trusted content, see also `extract` and `register_globals`) "allow random keys into your input", ignoring said keys doesn't.
Much as I find anti-competitive behavior contemptible, this article makes a glaring, uncorroborated assumption that Google's voice-to-speech functionality is currently being held up by Apple.

Looking closer, it's not even clear that ReadWriteWeb asked either party for a comment... note: "Google’s PR response to questions like this is that “we’re working closely with Apple” on getting it released." and "Well, Apple doesn’t talk about these things, so all we know is that it isn’t out."
not sure if mobile accessibility is on the priority list but this could use some more work: http://i.imgur.com/m5kru.png
yes, I had my wifi router with no password opened, I live in large apartment complex with 150 families around and the judge sent me to jail for 25 years and fined $3,000,000,000 (that's billions!) just because my IP was linked to 20,000 downloads.

Good job, judge!
I just wish Microsoft (or anyone, really) made mechanical keyboard with Natural layout.

That would be The Greatest Keyboard Ever Made.
What sort of timeframes did it typically take for these sites to become profitable? Are there any trends you've noticed or other details you wouldn't mind sharing?
10 Must Read eCommerce Blogs
Scrolling the homepage gave me a strong WTF feeling. This looks really really confusing.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish

Apple has 25% mobile market share. Android has 50%. Microsoft has about 90% desktop market share for over a decade. DirectX was made to kill off OpenGL. C# was made to kill off Java and keep software running on Windows. Microsoft killed of Netscape and a decade later IE6 isn't completely dead.

http://www.ie6countdown.com/

Android isn't going away and by my estimate it will always have more market share than iOS.

Btw, Microsoft completely killed of all other PC operating systems when they required PC vendors to pay for shipping DOS, regardless of the OS they actually shipped.
I suspect it depends how the keys feel for you. My advice would be go for the sun, they feel a lot nicer, so much lighter and less effort to type anyone. But I'm speaking as someone who loathes and detests the Model M that so many adore.
Yes that was my point. Its only the web part of Python.

The numeric side of Python projects like - Scipy, Numpy and other projects like Cython, iPython have constantly blown my mind every-time I speak to some physicist and mathematician. Many of the greatest minds are using Python tools in scientific computing and its constantly delivering innovation with contributions coming across the globe.
This Hogan fellow just keeps getting better and better.
15 Years after the First Slashdot Post
Morale problems can happen easily in the "trough of sorrow" which can be important to work through - many startups have found success at some point after one. If members don't know how to deal with that personally, it can end the company.
For whatever it's worth, I was reunited with my sister via Ancestry.com!

I'm not affiliated with either the Mormon Church or Ancestry.com... in fact, my sister and I both canceled our Ancestry.com account before the trial period was up and we never paid a dime. That was our first sign of proof we were truly siblings.
America to immigrants: keep your entrepreneurs
Willing to bet it's a bug.
It hurts Apple's customers because they are blocking a superior free product for no apparent reason but to kill competition.

As for: Not to beat a long dead horse, but the war between the two companies started when Google entered the mobile device space.

Was entering the mobile market a bad thing? was it not allowed? is it for Apple alone and no one else's? that statement doesn't make any sense. I'm sure there was a time when Apple entered the mobile business and Nokia wasn't none too pleased.
But even if they're using attr_accessible to whitelist parameters, the failure mode here would have been exactly the same.

The real culprit is Apple. It's just not ok to add unexpected parameters to people's POSTs. If anything, they should have put it in an HTTP header instead.
>> That expectation exists because there's a power relationship

You have it succinctly well worded and this point summarises most if not all workplace issues overall. As in a shoe-bite, where only the wearer knows how uncomfortable the whole feeling is, it is only when a person is stuck at the wrong end of a power relationship when they can (truly) empathise with someone else in that situation.

As I remember, Jacques Matthiej's article on FU money also spends some time pointing this factor out and how FU money inverts/negates this relationship to a large extent. Good point.

>> However, this one-sided "professionalism" whereby people are expected to keep the secrets of employers

^^ +1 that! I think the number of times people overlook this cannot be understated. Just a casual once-over of the most benign employee contract being worded nowadays will show how much it is stacked heavily against the employee (anecdotal observation from a few cases)

You're on song! :-)
So how many pair of shoes you wear? Two pairs? Really? One the right size and the others, really big ones over them? Really?

The point was, which you clearly missed - there can not currently be two voice assistanst AT THE SAME TIME in use. Googles thing does not replace Siri. If Google had something to replace Siri and Apple blocked it, then yes, that would be anti.
I was actually really hoping to see a Vonnegut.
I agree with what you're saying about pageviews as a metric for reader engagement, but it still seems like in an ideal world if the advertisers had a solid empirical measure of ad effectiveness rather than just a count of the impressions, then pagination would have no impact on ad revenues.
I'm having trouble understanding what the framework offers. Though I appreciate seeing code quickly, I'd like a better overview of what it does.
So, Apple's anti-competitive actions are justified as a counter measure to Google entering it's mobile device space? Since when did Apple own the mobile device "turf", isn't this a suppose to be a free market society? No market is sacred, companies should be making better products to compete and hold on to it's market share, not killing them and stifling innovation to keep a monopoly it no longer has.
Chat with Planboard founders
Would it be possible to move the ISS to this location? That would be pretty amazing.
Fact, you can search how much you want, you will not get a word more than that. With apple is hard to know anything about your apps let alone the app of another huge competitor.
Not all clients. Clients are different of course! Should something break it would be immediately obvious, and not all are prepared for that (obviously!).

It also depends on the structure of the site itself.

But some are comfortable changing a title, sending new arguments into panes and stuff like that. Again, depending on structure. As long as the job can be boiled down to a simple point and click routine, they get comfortable doing it. They're not too scared of filters either.

Some are also comfortable setting up new panel variants. It's an extremely powerful editorial tool, when setting up sections with teasers. ("breaking news" sections based on terms for instance.)
Except they "give an error" because the provided field doesn't exist in the database. Ignore for a second that half the reposts would break websites if an unexpected parameter yield an error instead of being ignored, if an untrusted client sent an "id" field, that would go through like hot steel through melted butter.
If you think it is correct to have only one keyboard, then you haven't see the alternative keyboards that ship with Android.

So much better.
The real question is, how does one short South Korean financial instruments? DI is going to crater as soon as Gangnam Style falls by the wayside. I give it another 2 months. It still hasn't hit South America.
(Was that a "Lensman" ref in your first line? ;-)
I don't know if it would even be possible to make piracy completely impossible without having some hardware lock on the device to make sure it only runs signed software, I'm going to assume that there is a pirate version of just about every game on Steam available on a torrent site somewhere.

I'm also not sure I like the idea of having an always-on internet based DRM built into every bit of software I use. Not being able to play a game because my internet connection is down is one thing, having it completely cripple my ability to get any work done is another thing altogether. In fact that may drive legit users towards piracy, since you would only need to be stung by that once.
Perhaps but having only read Savage Detectives it still felt like Bolano to me.
There are a few more syntax changes, like
[foo bar] now have to be [foo(bar)]
The progress you mention did not happen on its own, it took decades of struggle against powerful forces of exploitation and oppression to achieve. Those forces still exist, but their maneuverings and their goals are more well hidden from the public eye. They're no longer out there publicly saying that blacks are an inferior race, they're silently investigating neuro-marketing techniques to help them more effectively shape public opinion. Since their aims and means are no longer transparent to the public, comics like this are needed to illustrate what could happen if we continue to allow those in power to placate us with pleasure and pimp our instincts for profit.
I agree the title should be changed to match the original. But it was probably just an honest mistake.

Also I think you are being a little disingenuous. When you have the CEO of one company saying it will wage thermonuclear war on a product, that is clearly a statement of intent to destroy said product that goes beyond competition in the marketplace.

> ...the war between the two companies started when Google entered the mobile device space.

Entering a market isn't usually equated with starting a war.
I'm on my phone and can't reply to the substance of your post, and for that I apologize, but your comments demonstrate a stark ignorance of history. Overbearing parents (what does that even mean?) is as bad as child labor? Sure.

I don't think it's just technology. We are a more just and humane people than we have ever been. Now, it might be the product of prosperity, it is easier to be fair when you're not at the edge of survival, but I don't think that changes the fact that we are better regardless.
Actually Rails have a feature to mark certain parameters as not mass assignable.
I think comparing coding to writing works because they both show a flow of thought. How you write and how you code depends on the way thoughts flow from you. I feel that things like verbosity, word choice, sentence structure, etc. are very similar to logic choices and order of operations.

Also, both writers and programmers do a ton of refactoring. Most authors will go over their writing 2 or 3 time, eliminating words and sentences that are unnecessary, combining and shortening sentences to make them more readable, etc. A lot of refactoring happens in both.
Dickens got paid by the word.
I would expect a lot more code that does nothing.